This book collects three verse narratives by Russia's supreme poet, Alexander Pushkin; each is a masterpiece of its own genre, and plays with that genre in an entirely Pushkinian way. The least known of them, "The Bridegroom," in the stanza form of a wildly popular German Romantic ballad, is far more modern than a true Romantic ballad. "Count Nulin" is a comic tale of Russian country life, as light as a soufflé, reminiscent of the spontaneous brilliance of Eugene Onegin. The eerie, ironic "Tale of the Golden Cockerel" transforms the fairy tale genre with its bitter subtext of Pushkin's relations with the tsar.